Have you ever thought about the cost of your documents? Many of us only think about the cost of printing. Putting ink or toner on apage could cost you a few pennies or $.50 depending on what you print, whether you use black and white or color and what type of paper you use.
But that’s just the start of it. Documents drive businesses and moving that paper around is where the real cost lies.
Think about what’s involved in getting a new customer. There are presentations, quotes, contracts, proposals, invoices, service records and payment information. You have to create those documents, frequently print them, make copies, get them signed, process them and store them. That’s a lot of documents and most of it is still paper.
So how much time and money does a business typically spend on all this? Here are a few interesting statistics that might surprise you.
According to studies by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Gartner it costs about $75 to process a document and $20 to file one. On average each document gets copied 19 times. People spend up to 15% of their time reading information but up to 50% looking for it. About 7% of documents are lost and it costs $220 to reproduce a lost document.
Here’s some simple arithmetic. If you create 100 documents a day, you will have 25,000 by the end of the year. If you lose 7% of them, it will cost you $385,000 to recreate them. Add to that all the unnecessary time looking for documents and you can see that’s a lot of wasted time and money. For many businesses the numbers are 10 or 100 times as large.
If you use a document management system to handle all this paperwork, you can save quite a bit. Companies who have implemented a document management strategy can save up to 40% of their document costs.
Do you have a document management strategy?
